PAUL BOWLES
THE SPIDER’S HOUSE
With a Preface
by the Author
Introduction by Francine Prose
FOR MY FATHER
The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! the frailest of all houses is the spider’s house, if they but knew.
—THE KORAN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
BOOK 1 THE MASTER OF WISDOM
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
BOOK 2 SINS ARE FINISHED
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
BOOK 3 THE HOUR OF THE SWALLOWS
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
BOOK 4 THE ASCENDING STAIRWAYS
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
About the Author
BOOKS BY PAUL BOWLES
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
“Ten or twelve years ago there came to live in Tangier a man who would have done better to stay away.” This wickedly portentous sentence, which begins Paul Bowles’s story “The Eye,” could—with the medieval city of Fez substituted for the cosmopolitan port of Tangier—just as easily serve as the opening of The Spider’s House and for most of Bowles’s novels and stories, especially if we expand the list of ill-advised travel destinations to include nearly all of Morocco and a virtual Baedeker of hellish jungle outposts in Latin America and Asia. For Bowles’s obsessive subject, to which he returned again and again, and which he wrote about brilliantly, was the tragic and even fatal mistakes that Westerners so commonly make in their misguided and often presumptuous encounters with the mysteries of a foreign culture.
One can hardly imagine a more timely theme, one more perfectly suited to the perilous new world in which we find ourselves. Yet, strangely, Paul Bowles’s name never (as far as I know) appeared on those rosters of writers one saw mentioned in the aftermath of September 11, classic authors whose work appears to speak across centuries and decades, directly and helpfully addressing the crises and drastically altered realities of the present moment: terrorism, violence, neocolonialist warfare, revolution, and our dawning awareness of the hidden costs of colonialism and globalization. Perhaps it’s because the books that were commonly cited (War and Peace, The Possessed, The Secret Agent, and so forth) seemed, even at their most pessimistic, to offer some hope of redemption, some persuasive evidence of human resilience and nobility; whereas Bowles’s fiction is the last place you would go for hope, or for even faint reassurance that the world is anything but a horror show, a barbaric Darwinian battlefield.
Frequently, Bowles begins his fiction in ways that seem to promise (or threaten) the sort of narrative we might expect from other writers who have focused on the confrontation between East and West, from novelists as dissimilar as Conrad, Naipaul, and Forster, from works in which a naive colonial sightsees his way into one heart of darkness or another—and lives to regret it.
So The Spider’s House starts off with a prologue that could almost (but not quite) pass for the introduction to an unusually well written political thriller. John Stenham, a writer who has been living in Fez for a very long time, an American who speaks Arabic, who loves the culture with a passion bordering on the delusional, and who understands the locals as well as any Westerner can—which is to say, not at all—is being escorted home from a dinner party. His Moroccan hosts have insisted that the streets are unsafe for him to walk alone, and though Stenham resists with the insulted bravado of the foreigner who has proudly “gone native,” he accedes because the mood of the city has lately seemed restive and strange. “Ever since that day a year ago when the French, more irresponsible than usual, had deposed the Sultan, the tension had been there, and he had known it was there. But it was a political thing, and politics exist only on paper; certainly the politics of 1954 had no true connection with the mysterious medieval city he knew and loved.” Already, the sentient reader will have predicted that this “political thing” will affect Stenham more than he could have predicted or imagined, and that the shock of his highly unpleasant awakening will give the novel the sort of arc we might find in a book by, say, Graham Greene.
But almost immediately we can watch Bowles part company with his fellow authors and enter territory that he has claimed as uniquely his own, a universe that few, if any, of us would willingly choose to inhabit—which is not to say that Bowles’s lifelong residence in that bleak and harsh (though often grimly hilarious) landscape seems voluntary, exactly.
The next long section is written from the point of view of a Moroccan boy named Amar, a complex, intelligent, and intuitive kid from a poor and pious family who, despite his own sharp instincts and good judgment, gets pulled into the very heart of the “political thing” that Stenham would so love to avoid and ignore. It’s a convincing and daring portrait—notably few European or American writers have had the courage to write from the perspective of a North African Muslim boy—and one that is absolutely necessary for Bowles’s narrative strategy. Because Amar’s experience and his view of politics, of religion, of the nature of human existence, and of the way in which the universe operates could hardly be more unlike Stenham’s ideas or those of Stenham’s chic, decadent American and British friends. This profound and unbridgeable difference creates a tension that underlies—and spikes—the pressure created by the thickening web of conspiracy, and by the growing discord and bloody violence erupting in the souks and streets of Fez.
In his characteristically distanced, clinical, quietly confident and authoritative tone, employing a rigorously unadorned, quasi-journalistic prose style, Bowles approaches his material and his characters in a way that seems relentlessly anthropological, scientific, distanced, unbiased by either contempt and derision on the one hand or sympathy and affection on the other—or by any powerful or particular tribal loyalties of his own. Writing about expatriates and Moroccans warily coexisting in the crowded cities and desert encampments of North Africa, he depicts all these groups acting badly. Even the unusually appealing Amar turns out to be capable of committing murder (manslaughter, really) without suffering much remorse. Every community seems capable of carrying out any crime, no matter how mindless or vile—willing and able to do anything except understand one another.
What mostly (if not entirely) exempts Bowles from the charges of racism that his portrayals of brutal Moroccans have, at times, occasioned is the fact that his dispatches from the various frontiers of savagery are so evenhanded and inclusive. It’s not at all clear that the vengeful merchants in his story “The Delicate Prey” or the sadistic bandit tribe in “A Distant Episode” are any worse than the Frenchmen in The Spider’s House, who round up all the young males in the medina of Fez and bring them into the police station to be tortured and perhap
s killed. “As far as I can see,” said Bowles in a 1981 Paris Review interview, “People from all corners of the earth have an unlimited potential for violence.”
Readers accustomed to parsing literature for clues to the personal history of a writer, or for instruction on how to live, may be puzzled by the discrepancies between a body of work that seems to advise against ever leaving home and the facts of Bowles’s peripatetic existence. An avid and intrepid traveler, Paul (a dentist’s son from Queens) abandoned a promising career as a composer and spent much of his early adulthood in Paris and Germany, North Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, Ceylon, and Thailand. From the 1940s until his death in 1999, he was a more or less permanent resident of Tangier, where he lived with his famously eccentric and fascinating wife, Jane, author of the dazzlingly original novel Two Serious Ladies. He also formed a series of intimate relationships with Moroccan men and translated books of Mohgrebi oral narratives.
Bowles was immensely proud and fiercely territorial about his knowledge of North African customs, music, and folktales; about his familiarity with Islam, his fluency in Moghrebi, his ability to understand the North Africans around him or at least (unlike most foreigners) to admit, and know why, he would never understand them. In the prologue to The Spider’s House, there’s a revealing passage in which Stenham (the character who, one might argue, most nearly approaches being a stand-in for the author) admits to “a small sense of superiority to which he felt he was entitled, in return for having withstood the rigors of Morocco for so many years. This pretending to know something that others could not know, it was a little indulgence he allowed himself, a bonus for seniority. Secretly he was convinced that the Moroccans were much like any other people, that the differences were largely those of ritual and gesture …”
In fact, The Spider’s House should top the list of novels that speak to our current condition. Set during the first upheavals that announced a more radical and violent phase of the Moroccan struggle for independence from the French, the book seems not merely prescient but positively eerie in its evocation of a climate in which every aspect of daily life is affected—and deformed—by the roilings of nationalism and terrorism, and by the damage done by colonialism. It’s chilling to hear its characters speculate on the root causes of insurrection (“If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they’ll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.”) and on the grim compensations of terrorism. Listening to his father mourn the widespread sinfulness that, in his opinion, signals the end of Islam, Amar understands why his countrymen are “willing to risk dying in order to derail a train or burn a cinema or blow up a post office. It was not independence they wanted, it was a satisfaction much more immediate than that: the pleasure of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying, and the knowledge that they had at least the small amount of power necessary to bring about that humiliation. If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance, and that was all anyone really wanted now.”
Though it would be a reductive oversimplification, a gross injustice to the depth, inventiveness, and psychological complexity of this novel, it could conceivably be read as a sort of textbook, a monitory analysis of the sources of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. “The arms used against the Moroccan people were largely supplied by your government,” a nationalist tells Stenham. “They do not consider America a nation friendly to their cause.” Yet another agitator speculates on the most efficient means of getting American attention. “Once we’ve had a few incidents directly involving American lives and property, maybe the Americans will know there’s such a country as Morocco in the world … Now they don’t know the difference between Morocco and the Sénégal.” To make matters even more complicated, Bowles takes a dim view of the opportunism, the cynicism, the manipulative dishonesty, and the gross irresponsibility of the insurgent nationalist movement, the people’s so-called liberators; this is a coolly reasoned perspective which effectively prevents the reader from forming a simplistic view of the region’s problems, or of their solutions.
What makes this all the more intriguing, all the more persuasive, is that Bowles never thought of himself as a political writer—and, perhaps as a result, few readers see him that way. In the preface to The Spider’s House, he wrote, “Fiction should always stay clear of political considerations. Even when I saw that the book that I had begun was taking a direction which would inevitably lead it into a region where politics could not be avoided, I still imagined that with sufficient dexterity I should be able to avert contact with the subject. But in situations where everyone is under great emotional stress, indifference is unthinkable; at such times all opinions are construed as political ones. To be apolitical is tantamount to having assumed a political stance, but one which pleases no one. Thus, whether I liked it or not, when I had finished, I found that I had written a ‘political’ book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans.”
The last sentence is particularly telling. To be a political writer (as the term is generally understood) suggests strongly held opinions, a polemical agenda, a taking of sides—something that would have been not merely esthetic anathema but a characterological impossibility for the exquisitely detached Bowles. The novel’s characters (both Moroccan and American) repeatedly express their contempt for those fanatics who would willingly sacrifice individual lives to gain political objectives. Moreover, what Bowles tells us at the start (and what subsequently emerges) is that his initial impulse for writing the book derived from his fear that the city of Fez (and by extension, the rest of Morocco) would be changed and modernized beyond recognition—an anxiety that he wisely mistrusts as stemming from the most self-indulgent species of romanticism. In a startling flash of self-awareness, Stenham realizes, “It did not really matter whether they worshipped Allah or carburetors. In the end, it was his own preferences which concerned him. He would have liked to preserve the status quo because the decor that went with it suited his personal taste.” Throughout Bowles’s work, you can watch him battling against his own estheticism and cynicism (one of the characters in The Spider’s House calls Stenham “a hopeless romantic without a shred of confidence in the human race”), and straining to see the world and its denizens as they really are—without sentimentality, without illusions, without blinders.
However unintentional, the political subtext of his fiction provides us with yet another opportunity to note that when one writes accurately and comprehensively about human beings, politics inevitably comes into the story, since—it hardly needs to be said—politics exerts such an enormous influence on every aspect of our lives. Even Chekhov, whom we also tend to think of as a largely apolitical writer (in contrast, say, to Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy) frequently established or clarified the nature of his characters by informing the reader about their political sympathies.
How peculiar it suddenly seems to mention Chekhov and Bowles in the same paragraph, or even the same essay. Were there ever two more dissimilar literary sensibilities? With his sangfroid, his lack of empathy, his chilly refusal to demonstrate an even passing interest in the process of spiritual transformation or individual redemption, Bowles strikes us as the anti-Chekhov. Which may be why he seems, right now, as necessary as Chekhov, equally valuable in his contribution to the chorus of voices that comprise our literary heritage, and no less essential in his ability to remind us of who we are, of how we live, and of what we can—and inevitably will—do, in accordance with our nature.
In an era in which circumstances much like those that inspired The Spider’s House force us to enter into a highly partisan and passionate political engagement, we would do well to be aware, and wary, of the dangers and pitfalls of such an engagement: dogmatism, intolerance, the unshakeable conviction of one’s own righteousness and innocence, the inability or refusal to admit that other people, in other nations, have hearts and souls, loves and hatreds, that their lives are not so different from ou
rs, that they suffer and die just as we do. What Paul Bowles reminds us of, what he won’t let us forget, is that all of us, regardless of nationality or religion, are capable of acting from highly suspect, compromised, “primitive” motives—and of behaving in ways that, we would like to think, we could never even imagine.
—Francine Prose
PREFACE
I wanted to write a novel using as backdrop the traditional daily life of Fez, because it was a medieval city functioning in the twentieth century. If I had started it only a year sooner, it would have been an entirely different book. I intended to describe Fez as it existed at the moment of writing about it, but even as I started to write, events that could not be ignored had begun to occur there. I soon saw that I was going to have to write, not about the traditional pattern of life in Fez, but about its dissolution.
For more than two decades I had been waiting to see the end of French rule in Morocco. Ingenuously I had imagined that after Independence the old manner of life would be resumed and the country would return to being more or less what it had been before the French presence. The detestation on the part of the populace of all that was European seemed to guarantee such a result. What I failed to understand was that if Morocco was still a largely medieval land, it was because the French themselves, and not the Moroccans, wanted it that way.
The Nationalists were not interested in ridding Morocco of all traces of European civilization and restoring it to its pre-colonial state; on the contrary, their aim was to make it even more “European” than the French had made it. When France was no longer able to keep the governmental vehicle on the road, she abandoned it, leaving the motor running. The Moroccans climbed in and drove off in the same direction, but with even greater speed.
I was embroiled in the controversy, at the same time finding it impossible to adopt either side’s point of view. My subject was decomposing before my eyes, hour by hour; there was no alternative to recording the process of violent transformation.